beyond the pale

Shannon C. needs advice on an inter-office social dilemma.

Juicy! Go help!

Translation: Go — quick like a bunny — and tell her the same thing I did. 😉

Hang in there, Shannon! Don’t let the gammies get you down.

This new blog I found!

I just love the whole premise: Two girlfriends on opposite coasts, Portland, OR and Portland, ME, take photographs every morning — they’re early risers — and post them together. They never discuss the photographs beforehand, nothing is planned, but it’s fascinating to see the synchronicity of the images. Gorgeous. Simple and gorgeous.

(Sheila, you must check it out.)

A couple of clogs about Dream Girls:

— Eddie Murphy was just kind of eh in Dream Girls — to me. And I know he’s nominated for an Oscar for it and all, but — and this is my problem, my Eddie Murphy problem — I cannot take him seriously, I guess. Too many times seeing him do sketches on SNL or something. No, that’s not it. Because I don’t have that problem with, say, Will Ferrell. I loved him in Stranger Than Fiction. I’ve loved Jim Carrey in several things, like The Truman Show or The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, etc. So it’s not some “I can’t believe a comedian as a serious actor” thing. I don’t have that. I don’t. (Never mind that I hate Robin Williams in general, in everything, everywhere. That’s a separate issue. A separate ranting post, really.) Watching Dream Girls, though, I actually kept thinking that Jamie Foxx and Eddie Murphy should have switched parts. Eddie Murphy wasn’t working for me. And it’s bugging me that I can’t really even place my finger on WHY, precisely, I thought he was just eh. I didn’t believe him, somehow. I need to see it again to figure out why. So basically, this is still a clog in my brain and not worth talking about.

— Jennifer Hudson was simply amazing. I thought I was gonna throw up or wet my pants or burst out blubbing when she sang “And I am Telling You, I’m Not Going.” It was overwhelming. I felt like I’d been beaten; like I would come out bruised after that. And frankly, when she wasn’t onscreen, I was kinda bored. (Maybe that’s part of the Eddie problem).

— What is with that “We are a Family” (or whatever) song from that show? When they all gather ’round Effie (Hudson) and sing about being family after she finds out that Deena (Beyonce) is replacing her as lead singer? Stupid. I was literally whispering under my breath, “ACK! Stop it! STOP. Gross.” Did not work for me at ALL. Some of the numbers just bugged.

— Did I mention Jennifer Hudson? DAY-ummm. Rent the thing on DVD, fast forward to her big number — or any number with her in it — and call it a day.

Okay. Other things. “PRRRO-ceed,” as MB always says.

Random quotes clogging my brain:

— Years ago, watching a friend’s two kids — Arielle, 5 and Bryce, 2 playing in a kiddie pool. Bryce is naked. Out of the blue, Arielle reaches out and clamps her little fist around his little penis. My friend, observing this, totally calm, just drily says, “Arielle, don’t grab Bryce’s peenie.” So I am suddenly haunted by the word “peenie.” I cannot stop laughing about it, about the tone in her voice when she said it, about how Arielle instantly declamped her fist from around Bryce’s peenie.

— Also: I am haunted by something stupid I said two Christmases ago at my in-laws. I am always nervous there. Small town, never a locked door, constant stream of people in and out wanting to talk for hours about “glory days” and such. I can sit for an entire afternoon and lissssten and not be spoken to once by any visitor. Weird. One day, after a steady, exhausting stream of high school friends, we were finally all alone — me, MB, his parents. I was completely wiped out from the long loquacious walk down Other-People’s-Memory Lane. I couldn’t speak because pretty much all the words since the dawn of time had been used up already in the space of an afternoon. So I just slouched in a chair and watched one of the family’s dogs, a Blue Tic Hound named Beau, pace around the room, all crooked from hip displacement. After several minutes of this, he stopped a couple of feet in front of me. I was still just sitting, but now I was also staring at an old dog’s ass. And nothing was happening. There was just silence in the room. There was breathing, of course. Breathing and a meandering dog and SILENCE. Suddenly, irrationally, I broke all dead-voiced into that silence with:

“Beau sure has a big anus.”

Silence. Just yawning, big-anused silence.

So, anyhoo ….. today, I am haunted by Eddie Murphy and peenies and Beau’s big anus.

I’ve had this saved in my image file for — I don’t know how long.

This photograph of a collapsed, starving Sudanese toddler being stalked by a vulture was taken in 1993 by photojournalist Kevin Carter. He won a Pulitzer for it in May 1994 and killed himself in July 1994. His suicide note read, in part:

“I am depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.”

“What did YOU do on Valentine’s Day, Tracey?”

“Oh, you know, did a little Roving Eyeball Theatre. So, uhm, stay tuned.”

Here’s the trailer. Can you hear That Voiceover Guy:

“In a world where there were only eyeballs, she was the eyeballsiest.”